Re: Column order performance - Mailing list pgsql-performance

From Josh Berkus
Subject Re: Column order performance
Date
Msg-id 200408101023.28084.josh@agliodbs.com
Whole thread Raw
In response to Column order performance  (Bill Montgomery <billm@lulu.com>)
List pgsql-performance
Bill,

> Does the order of columns of varying size have any effect on
> SELECT/INSERT/UPDATE/and/or/DELETE performance? Take the example where
> an integer primary key is listed first in the table and alternatively
> listed after some large varchar or text columns?

No, the "order" of the columns in the table makes no difference.  They are not
physically stored in the metadata order, anyway; on the data pages,
fixed-length fields (e.g. INT, BOOLEAN, etc.) are stored first and
variable-length fields (CHAR, TEXT, NUMERIC) after them, AFAIK.

The only thing I have seen elusive reports of is that *display* speed can be
afffected by column order (e.g. when you call the query to the command line
with many rows) but I've not seen this proven in a test case.

--
Josh Berkus
Aglio Database Solutions
San Francisco

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